Review: A Stylishly Blood-and-Guts Tenor in the Met Opera’s ‘Werther’

I do not often blush while sitting in the darkness of an opera house. But when Massenet’s “Werther” opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday evening and the tenor Vittorio Grigolo declared his love for the young, respectable Charlotte, artfully weaving and fervently flinging vocal lines at and around her, I’m not embarrassed to admit I found myself getting flushed.

“My entire soul is in these lines,” Werther cries during one of his many fits of passion. When Mr. Grigolo sings the role, you believe it. Both brazen and intimate, his muscular voice crinkling with emotion, he may be the most galvanically convincing singer in the world today.

Mr. Grigolo, who sings “Werther” four more times through March 4, does blood and guts, but stylishly. He understands that opera is a careful calibration of explosion and control, and he manipulates that balance to leave you — as you’re left when watching all the best operatic performances — in a state of both satisfied delight and sustained, agonizing tension.

As Werther, a sensitive poet who falls for the sweet, responsible Charlotte (Isabel Leonard) even though she has promised to marry another man, Mr. Grigolo restlessly stalks the picturesquely askew sets of Richard Eyre’s production. On Thursday both his movements and his arias seemed like sudden, spontaneous decisions, eruptions out of repression.

Early on, some soft, hovering phrases felt faked and toneless: The role ideally calls for more evenness and refinement than Mr. Grigolo can summon in the crucial transitional space — called, in French, the “voix mixte,” or mixed voice — between a singer’s high, airy “head voice” and his fuller, brawnier “chest voice.” But if Mr. Grigolo moves through the different parts of his instrument more like a bulldozer than a cat, he is always earnest and involving, his heart on his sleeve and his energy unflagging.

He was matched, effusion for effusion, in the orchestra pit. Massenet’s lush scores can easily wilt, but on Thursday, Edward Gardner led a performance that was sumptuous without ever slogging — not grandly imposing but straightforward and sincere. Lyrical expansion never stinted on forward-moving vigor, right up to the slashing grimaces in the low strings at the very end.

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Vittorio Grigolo in “Werther.”CreditIan Douglas for The New York Times

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Vittorio Grigolo and Isabel Leonard in “Werther,” at the Metropolitan Opera.CreditIan Douglas for The New York Times

The coolly elegant Ms. Leonard was a Charlotte more sophisticated than humble, but she was superbly polished, her voice smooth and supple. If she sometimes seemed to be waiting, prettily and patiently, for another, more patrician Werther — as far as classic Met comparisons go, Mr. Grigolo was likely closer to fiery Franco Corelli than discreet Alfredo Kraus — her silvery grace was a foil to his heat. While the two made an exceptionally handsome couple, they only seemed truly on the same page when their longstanding attempts to deny their love went seriously south near the end of the opera, prompting — spoiler alert — Werther’s prolonged death scene. (They have a stage kiss you won’t soon forget.)

In the thankless role of Albert, the pleasantly dull fellow Charlotte marries instead of Werther, David Bizic was pleasantly, robustly dull. Maurizio Muraro sang with jocular heartiness, and a lovely helping of tenderness, as the Bailiff, Charlotte’s father, and Anna Christy was perky if wiry-toned as Sophie, her kid sister.

The Met has done well by Massenet of late: “Manon” in 2015, with Mr. Grigolo and his best partner, Diana Damrau, as a combustible central couple; this lovingly revived “Werther”; and, next season, both the Cinderella opera “Cendrillon,” starring the radiant Joyce DiDonato, and the exotic “Thaïs,” thoughtfully cast with Ailyn Pérez, Jean-François Borras and Gerald Finley.

But the situation has not always been so impressive. When Mr. Eyre’s “Werther” staging had its premiere in 2014, with Jonas Kaufmann and Sophie Koch as the star-crossed couple, it felt mannered and detached. This new revival could not be more different, and if there is very little gentility about it, nor much of the poised stylization of traditional French style, it has a vitality that is utterly arresting. This is a fully Italianate Massenet: A Grigolo has crashed Paris.

And if he was irresistible as an impulsively romantic, eventually suicidal young man in the Met’s “Roméo et Juliette” last month, he is just as unmissable as the impulsively romantic, eventually suicidal young Werther.